Big brother is really watching now

Not so sure about this one: While Jacobs has designed the application for tracking runs, another viable use for this is tracking trips in vehicles. Businesses looking to keep an eye on their employees' short-haul trips could use such a system to make sure they're going where they said they did.

Yes, it's a fun way to keep track of how far you have run, or even cycled. But do we need our bosses watching our every step? On the one hand it stops (or maybe just slows down) some slackers who need to be chastened, but for the ordinary delivery or sales guy or gal, can't they have some respite from being tracked? I guess they could just switch it off, but that invites questions. Or pay someone else to go to the locations specified, although that's only if you are desperate enough to do something really dodgy!

There are many good reasons to use employee 'tracking' - to look for patterns, good, bad or nefarious, and to optimise routes, reduce waste, ensure workers take adequate breaks and minimise fuel use. As long as the workers are given breaks, of course. If you look at factory and office jobs it's hard to hide from the boss anyway, and what a GPS tracking system really does is simply bring these 'outdoor' jobs into line with what we accept in other workplaces. It does reduce or remove the 'freedom' I once had as a sales rep, something that balanced the pressure and grind of making sales. And I imagine it will make some jobs less enticing for that exact reason. However with the advent of multiple GPS-enabled devices it seems inevitable that this sort of 'feature' will become the norm.